Stephen Boyd Davis leads staff research activities in the School of Design. He helps individuals and groups to develop research projects and to secure funding.
Originally a textile designer, Stephen has for many years been involved in the creative use of digital technologies, most recently in locative media where digital material escapes the boundaries of the screen and becomes part of our experience in the world.
Stephen’s personal research is concerned with the visual representation of historical time, especially in interactive digital media. His research combines historical investigation and the development of new practice.
Stephen Boyd Davis is responsible for staff research activities in the School of Design, which includes Design Interactions, Design Products, Innovation Design Engineering, RapidformRCA, Service Design and Vehicle Design.
Stephen has worked and taught in design since 1976, specialising in digital media from the 1980s when he pioneered the integration of computing into UK art and design education. In 1987 he was a founding member of the Association for Computing in Art and Design Education. In 1992 he cofounded one of the first Master’s programmes in the world dealing with interactive media; its graduates have influenced industry and education worldwide. He is a committee member of the Computer Arts Society which explores the history of the computer in visual and other art forms and encourages new work. From 2005 to 2011 he was head of the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, inspired by the work of Professor John Lansdown, a pioneer of the use of creative computing from the 1960s to his death in 1999.
In recent years Stephen has moved increasingly towards research, both in his own activities and publications, and in developing and managing the research work of others. Key themes of his work are spatialised media, visualisation, depiction and forms of research, centred on his fascination with representation. His point of view is a pragmatic one, focusing on the effectiveness of particular representations as much as on their alleged truth.
Stephen is extensively involved in the evaluation of research through peer review for UK Research Councils, journals and conferences and the UK Research Excellence Framework 2014.
Stephen has a BA Hons first class in Printed and Woven Textiles from Camberwell School of Art and Crafts (now part of the University of the Arts London), a PGDip in Woven Textiles from Leeds University and a PhD from Middlesex University, where his dissertation explored the uses of space in depiction across a variety of media.